There were half a dozen ships in the harbour, and Blood scanned them with anxiety until his glance alighted on a black brigantine that was bellied like a Flemish alderman. Those lines were a sufficient advertisement of her Dutch origin, and Captain Blood, sweeping alongside, hailed her with confidence and climbed to her deck.
«I am in haste,» he informed her sturdy captain, «to reach the northern coast of French Hispaniola, and I will pay you well for a passage thither.»
The Dutchman eyed him without favour. «If you're in haste you had better seek what you need elsewhere. I am for Curacao.»
«I've said I'll pay you well. Five thousand pieces of eight should compensate you for delays.»
«Five thousand pieces!» The Dutchman stared. The sum was as much as he could hope to earn by his present voyage. «Who are you, sir?»
«What's that to the matter? I am one who will pay five thousand pieces.»
The skipper of the brigantine screwed up his little blue eyes. «Will you pay in advance?»
«The half of it. The other half I shall obtain when my destination is reached. But you may hold me aboard until you have the money.» Thus he ensured that the Dutchman, ignorant of the fact that the entire sum was already under his hand, should keep faith.
«I could sail to–night,» said the other slowly.
Blood at once produced one of the two bags. The other he had stowed in one of the water–casks in the locker of the pinnace, and there it remained unsuspected until four days later, when they were in the narrow seas between Hispaniola and Tortuga.
Then Captain Blood, announcing that he would put himself ashore, paid over the balance of the money, and climbed down the side of the brig to re–enter the pinnace. When, presently, the Dutchman observed him to be steering not, indeed, towards Hispaniola, but a northerly course in the direction of Tortuga, that stronghold of the buccaneers, his growing suspicions may have been fully confirmed. He remained, however, untroubled, the only man who, in addition to Blood himself, had really profited by that transaction on the Island of Mariegalante.
Thus Captain Blood came back at last to Tortuga and to the fleet that was by now mourning him as dead. With that fleet of five tall ships he sailed into the harbour of Basseterre a month later with intent to settle a debt which he conceived to lie between Colonel de Coulevain and himself.
His appearance there in such force fluttered both the garrison and the inhabitants. But he came too late for his purposes. Colonel de Coulevain was no longer there to be fluttered. He had been sent back to France under arrest.
Captain Blood was informed of this by Colonel Sancerre, who had succeeded to the military command of Mariegalante, and who received him with the courtesy due to a filibuster who comes backed by the powerful fleet that Blood had anchored in the roadstead.
Captain Blood fetched a sigh when he heard the news. «A pity! I had a little word to say to him; a little debt to settle.»
«A little debt of five thousand pieces of eight, I think,» said the Frenchman.
«On my faith, you are well informed.»
The Colonel explained. «When the General of the Armies of France in America came here to inquire into the matter of the Spanish raid on Mariegalante, he discovered that Colonel de Coulevain had robbed the French Colonial Treasury of that sum. There was proof of it in a quittance that was found among M. de Coulevain's papers.»
«So that's where he got the money!»
«I see that you understand.» The Commandant looked grave. «Robbery is a serious, shameful matter, Captain Blood.»
«I know it is. I've practised a good deal of it myself.»
«And I've little doubt that they will hang M. de Coulevain, poor devil.»
Captain Blood nodded. «No doubt of that. But we'll save our tears to water some nobler grave, my Colonel.»
Colonel Sancerre eyed him with cold disapproval. «This hardly comes well from you, Captain Blood. It was to save you from the English that Colonel de Coulevain paid over the money, was it not?»
«Hardly to save me from them. To buy me from them so that he might sell me again to Spain at a handsome profit. He had an eye to a profit, your Colonel de Coulevain.»
«But what do you tell me?» cried Sancerre.
«That it's entirely a poetic thing that the quittance he took on my behalf should be the means of hanging him.»
X — GALLOWS KEY
It is impossible now to determine whether Gallows Key took its name from the events I am about to relate or bore it already previously among seafaring men. Jeremy Pitt in his log gives no hint, and the miniature island is not now to be identified with precision. All that we know positively, and this from Pitt's log of the Arabella, is that it forms part of the group known as the Albuquerque Keys, lying in 12° northern latitude and 85° western longitude, some sixty miles north–west of Porto Bello.
It is little more than a barren rock, frequented only by sea–birds and the turtles that come to deposit their eggs in the golden sand of the reef–enclosed lagoon on its eastern side. This strip of beach shelves rapidly to a depth of some sixty fathoms, and the entrance to the lagoon is by a gap of not more than twenty yards in the rocky amphitheatre which goes to form it.
Into this secure if desolate haven sailed Captain Easterling one April day of the year 1688 in his thirty–gun frigate the Avenger, followed by the two ships that made up his fleet: the Hermes, a frigate of twenty–six guns, commanded by Roger Galloway, and the Valiant, a brigantine carrying twenty, in charge of Crosby Pike, who once had sailed with Captain Blood and was realizing his mistake in making a change of admiral.
You will remember this scoundrel Easterling, how once he had tried a fall with Peter Blood, when Blood was on the very threshold of his career as a buccaneer, and how, as a consequence, Easterling's ship had been blown from under him and himself swept from the seas.
But laboriously, with the patience and tenacity found in bad men as in good, Easterling had won back to his old position, and was afloat once more and in greater strength than ever before upon the Caribbean.
He was, in Peter Blood's own words, just a filthy pirate, a ruthless, bloodthirsty robber, without a spark even of that honour which is said to prevail among thieves. His followers made up a lawless mob, of mixed nationalities, subject to no discipline and obeying no rules save those which concerned the division of their spoils. They practised no discrimination in their piracy. They would attack an English or Dutch merchantman as readily as a Spanish galleon, and deal out the same ruthless brutality to the one as to the other.
Now, despite his ill–repute even among buccaneers, he had succeeded in luring away from Blood's following the resolute Crosby Pike, with his twenty–gun ship and well–disciplined crew of a hundred and thirty men. The lure had been that old story of Morgan's treasure with which Easterling once had unsuccessfully attempted to beguile Blood.
Again he told that hoary tale of how he had sailed with Henry Morgan and had been with him at the sack of Panama; how — as was well known — on the return march across the isthmus there had been all but mutiny among Morgan's followers on a suspicion that the booty divided among them was very far from being all the booty taken; how it was murmured that Morgan had secretly abstracted a great portion for himself; how Morgan, becoming alarmed lest a mutinous search of his personal baggage should reveal the truth of the rumour, had taken Easterling into his confidence and sought his aid in what he was to do. Between them they had buried that treasure — a treasure of pearls and precious stones of the fabulous value of at least half a million pieces of eight — at a spot on the banks of the Chagres River. They were to return to unearth it later when opportunity should serve. Morgan, however, swept by destiny along other profitable pursuits, was still postponing his return when death overtook him. Easterling had never returned because never before had he commanded the necessary force for the penetration of Spanish territory, or the necessary strength of ships for the safe conveyance of the treasure once it was reclaimed.